Pain

I was ready to dismiss this out of hand. Iris is encountering a relapse in pain, the result of being seriously injured in a car bomb attack nearly a decade earlier. In seeking treatment she runs into her high school love that cruelly disappeared from her life after the death of his mother. It's an emo midlife crisis with breathless admissions of rekindled love and furtive assignations. Iris' husband is distant, her daughter is away from home and her son is growing up way too quickly, nearly an adult himself. Iris toys with embracing this thwarted love that was cut too abruptly in her youth and justifies the inevitability of this.

But it's all setup for the second half when the focus widens to include quotidian aspects of marriage that extend beyond the personal. How the mundane can hardly compete with the novel and new but how it brings with it a reliability forged over time. All these facets are subtly brought to bear so that you're not reading about whether Iris will or won't blow up her marriage. That's the easy read, Zeruya Shalev is interested in what a marriage becomes over time, for better or worse.